Bob Jacobs

Karma: 1,614

I’m a student of moral science at the university of Ghent. I also started and ran EA Ghent from 2020 to 2024, at which point I quit in protest over the Manifest scandal (and the reactionary trend it highlighted). I now no longer consider myself an EA (but I’m still part of GWWC and EAA, and if the rationalists split off I’ll join again).

If you’re interested in philosophy and mechanism design, consider checking out my blog.

I co-started Effectief Geven (Belgian effective giving org), am a volunteer researcher at SatisfIA (AI-safety org) and a volunteer writer at GAIA (Animal welfare org).

Possible conflict of interests: I have never received money from EA, but could plausibly be biased in favor of the organizations I volunteer for.

Bob Jacobs Feb 7, 2023, 1:17 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Is now a good time to advocate for prediction market governance experiments in the UK?
Allowing anonymous predictions causes a whole bunch of other problems. But even we could somehow get rid of coordination mechanisms like: dominance assurance contracts, the fear of losing your social network, or psychological loyalty towards your ingroup, is it really in your own interest to lose the source of income for you and your children for a <51% chance of a one time payout, or will the outcomes of conditional prediction markets be biased towards the interests of rich people?

Bob Jacobs Feb 7, 2023, 12:15 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tom Shlomi’s comment on: Is this a way to manipulate prediction markets?
won’t affect my trading much
It will affect the trading and worse it will affect the trading inconsistently so we can’t even use mathematics to subtract it. When the president promises not to manipulate the market about event X some people will trust him 90% and bet accordingly while others will trust him 10% and bet according to that. But that’s not the same thing as people having 10% credence event X will happen, it can be that you think the president is trustworthy but the event itself is unlikely.
On top of that the president might react to the market, e.g if there is a lot of money to be gained he’d risk it but otherwise he wouldn’t, but some people might think the president will manipulate the market at 51% when there is some money to be gained, while others think he will only act at 90% when there is a lot of money to be gained (or any other number of percentages), at seemingly random intervals people will suddenly buy or sell stock depending on what the price itself is doing. And the president might react to that etc, it becomes a recursive mindgame instead of being about event X. The resulting percentage cannot be used as a measure of trustworthiness nor as a measure of the underlying probability of event X.
assassinate CEOs
This is always the go-to example defenders of prediction markets use, but it’s not representative since it’s the most extreme possible version of manipulation. No, I don’t think most people will start murdering folk to influence prediction markets, not just because it could land you in jail, but also because it’s difficult to execute and most people have an aversion to murder. But you can manipulate prediction markets in much more easy, mundane and legal ways. If I say I will do something and can subsequently win a bunch of money by not doing it, without anyone noticing, that’s not even illegal, let alone difficult.
I’m confused by your last paragraph
I’ll use the example I used in my other comment:
If people can make it rain and there is e.g a market for every hour of the day, will people really check that every single user who has betted on time T has also betted on time T+1 or else find it suspicious? Because that would mean that now T+1 becomes suspicious if they didn’t bet on T+2 etc.
Not only that, it also effects related markets like “will it hail at time T” and if subsequently not betting on that one is suspicious, then markets that are related to that one, like “will it be cold at time T” also become suspicious etc.
So every time a new market is opened and people see that not every user who has betted on related markets has betted on this new market, then everyone will update the related markets which will in turn update their related markets etc. In this model the only way for prediction markets to become accurate is if every user bets on every market and every user is aware of the bets of every other user and is updating on all those bets ²⁴⁄₇.
Suffice to say, if you combine the fact that 1) humans can’t instantly know all the new information with 2) the fact we can’t know whether the market has updated because of information that we already know, new information, or people updating on the assumption that there is new information, with 3) recursive mindgames and 4) these constant ‘ripples’ of shifting uncertainties; you’ll get so much asynchronous noise that the prediction market becomes an unreliable source.
Again, this is only for things we can change, prediction markets will work on things we can’t change, like predicting supernovas (until the day we can cause them)

Bob Jacobs Feb 6, 2023, 7:55 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Is now a good time to advocate for prediction market governance experiments in the UK?
But is it in your individual interest? Is making enemies of your friends and family while losing a guaranteed lifelong stream of income for you and your children really worth it for the possibility of having a one time large payout?
What about with different probabilities? What if you think the policy has a 51% chance of helping the poor and a 49% chance of doing nothing. This would be a fantastic policy to try but even without coordination mechanisms like dominance assurance contracts, I doubt a self interested rich person would sacrifice their social network and lifelong stream of income for a 51% of having a one time large payout (actually less than 51% since it probably won’t be implemented due to the conditional prediction market).

Bob Jacobs Feb 6, 2023, 2:03 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Is now a good time to advocate for prediction market governance experiments in the UK?
Won’t conditional prediction markets give rich people more ways to influence policy?
Let’s say the people of Examplestan have a large underclass who live paycheck to paycheck and a small upperclass who gets their money from inheritance. The government is thinking of introducing a bill that would make their tax revenue come less from paychecks and more from inheritance. Democracy advocates want to put it to a vote, but a group of futarchy lobbyists convince the government to run a conditional prediction market instead.
The market question is “If we replace the paycheck tax with an inheritance tax, will welfare increase?”. The large underclass has almost no money to bet that it will, while the small upperclass bets a large chunk of their money that it won’t. Predictably, more money is betted on it not increasing welfare and when the market closes, everyone gets their money back and the government decides not to implement it.

Bob Jacobs Feb 4, 2023, 12:45 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tom Shlomi’s comment on: Is this a way to manipulate prediction markets?
You can easily manipulate the markets without getting caught, which makes a persons promise to not manipulate the market impossible to check and therefore impossible to trust.
And it’s not just markets about yourself that are easy to manipulate, it’s markets about everything you can change. So if there is a market about if the bin in my street will be tipped over, that market isn’t about me, but it’s trivially easy to manipulate. As humanity becomes more powerful the things we can change become larger and larger and the things we can use prediction markets for become smaller and smaller.
The calibrating solution wouldn’t work because the premises of perfect information and logical omniscience only hold in economists imagination. See my other comment for a concrete example.

Bob Jacobs Jan 27, 2023, 9:38 PM
23 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Bob Jacobs’s Shortform
The Netherlands passed a law that would ban factory farming.
It was introduced by the Party for the Animals and passed in 2021. However, it only passed because the government had just fallen and the senate was distracted by passing covid laws, which meant they were very busy and didn’t have a debate about it. Since the law is rather vague there’s a good chance it wouldn’t have passed without the covid crisis.
It was supposed to start this year, but the minister of agriculture has decided he will straight up ignore the law . The current government is not in favor of this law and so they’re looking at ways to circumvent it.
It’s very unusual for the Dutch government to ignore laws, so they might get sued by animal rights activists. I expect they will introduce a new law rather quickly that repeals this ban, but the fact that it passed at all and that this will now become a big issue in the news is very promising for the 116 million Dutch farm animals.
What links here?
- Animal Welfare is now enshrined in the Belgian Constitution by Bob Jacobs (May 3, 2024, 10:26 PM; 95 points)
- Bob Jacobs's comment on Bob Jacobs’s Quick takes by Bob Jacobs (Mar 16, 2023, 5:48 PM; 10 points)

Bob Jacobs Jan 20, 2023, 12:53 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Bob Jacobs’s Shortform
After years of using this forum I started to have problems with my writings not appearing on the frontpage and the mods not answering my messages the day I started criticizing EA.
This may very well be a coincidence in which case I genuinely apologize for the implied accusal. I still think it’s important to mention it in case other people are having the same problem.
EDIT: After commenting this I suddenly lost a lot of karma due to downvotes:
EDIT 2: To respond to the reply, it’s not all messages on the intercom, and it’s been happening for a bit longer than the last couple days. But I can totally understand that you are overloaded right now so fair enough I’ll drop that point. More importantly, it’s not just happening with the comments on popular posts and not just with comments either.
I suddenly lost a lot of karma but I wanted to show some proof that I didn’t make that up so I went to settings and changed it to “show downvotes” and set it to batch at the nearest hour. That way I could make a screenshot of it and provide some proof it happened.
EDIT 3: I think it’s back to normal, and for the record I don’t think the admins themselves went back and downvoted me.

Bob Jacobs Jan 18, 2023, 8:16 PM
−2 points
6 ∶ 3
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Possible changes to EA, a big upvoted list
But I think that those who have spent a long time on the forum do tend to be better informed and I do want their votes to count for more.
You made about +448 karma from the last post. When an actual scientist like Jobst comes here and posts a very well informed post, it get’s +1 karma (from me, love ya Jobst). People like Jobst have a fulltime job as a scientist and are too productive to spend most of their time online, and when they do go online they are so well informed it won’t give them any voting power because terminally online people like us are simply not informed enough to understand him, and we have all the voting power. If you say something true but unpopular to those who already have power, you might even lose karma. There is no reason to think that those who have more voting power are more informed, more productive or more altruistic.
EDIT: To clarify: not literally his last post, his last post like this. Splitting things up into smaller vote-able chunks (like this post) nets you more voting-power than making the big posts of criticisms that inspire them. Having a high quantity is a better path to gaining voting power than high quality. This allows a few highly active (and thus most likely orthodox) users to boost or tank any piece of writing.
When we combine this with the fact that low karma comments are hidden we basically allow people with high karma (most likely orthodox users) to soft-censor their own critics.

Bob Jacobs Jan 18, 2023, 7:44 PM
2 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Possible changes to EA, a big upvoted list
You could’ve made a poll. That wouldn’t have given you nearly as much karma/voting-power, and that wouldn’t have given those who already have a lot of power the ability to influence the results. For the record I’m not angry at you, I’m angry at the karma system and the groupthink it generates. Given that I also have undemocratic power, I will stick to my own principles and not vote on these questions.

Bob Jacobs Jan 18, 2023, 7:04 PM
−10 points
5 ∶ 10
on: Possible changes to EA, a big upvoted list
You already got a lot of karma/voting-power when you asked the same thing last month. As I pointed out then, we cannot conclude what the community believes or wants based on an undemocratic karma system.
EDIT: Everyone who wants some easy undemocratic voting-power, go to last months question-post and copy the top level suggestions.

Bob Jacobs Jan 18, 2023, 6:01 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: People
I think Sam Bankman-Fried should be removed from this page.
I don’t think this page is especially conducive to combatting hero worship, but even if we decide to keep it I think we should rethink who is included and excluded from this page (maybe with a poll?)

Bob Jacobs Jan 18, 2023, 2:44 PM
33 points
8 ∶ 4
on: Doing EA Better
This post has convinced me to stay in the EA community. If I could give all the votes I have given to my own writings to this post, I would. Many of the things in this post I’ve been saying for a long time (and have been downvoted for) so I’m happy to see that this post has at least a somewhat positive reaction.
To add to what this post outlines. While the social sciences are often ignored in the EA community one notable exception to that is (orthodox) economics. I find it ironic that one of the few fields where EA’s are willing to look outside their own insular culture, is in itself extremely insular. Other social studies like philosophy, political science, history, sociology, gender studies all make a lot of attempts to integrate themselves with all the other social sciences. This makes it so that learning about one discipline also teaches you about the other disciplines. Economists meanwhile have a tendency to see their discipline as better than the others starting papers with things like:
Economics is not only a social science, it is a genuine science. Like the physical sciences, economics uses a methodology that produces refutable implications and tests these implications using solid statistical techniques.
In the paper “The Superiority of Economists” by Fourcade et al, economists were found to be the only group that thought interdisciplinary research was worse than research from a singular field. Furthermore they looked at top papers from political science, economics and sociology. They found that political science and sociology cited economics papers many times more than the other way around:
This lack of citing other social sciences was later confirmed by Angrist et al:

Given the complex interdisciplinary nature of societal issues, studying the basics of economics might make you overconfident that you can solve societal problems.
Take for example supply and demand. The standard supply and demand model will tell you that having/increasing the minimum wage will automatically increase unemployment. But if we look at actual empirical evidence it shows us that it doesn’t. Learning the basics of economics might mislead people about which policies will actually help people and a more holistic look at the social sciences as a whole may counter that.
By focussing our recruitment on only a couple disciplines we inherit the problems of those disciplines. It is no wonder then that just like the EA community, economics is also very homogeneous. Bayer and Rouse show us that women are given less degrees in economics than other disciplines:
And get only 13.7% of the authorship of economics papers. Women are also less likely to get tenure in their first academic job compared to men and face a lot of discrimination in general. An AEA survey found that half of women say they were treated unfairly because of their sex and almost half say they’ve avoided conferences/seminars because of fear of harassment.
One of the only other social studies that is popular in EA is philosophy, which has similar issues with underrepresentation and discrimination.
For the longest time the EA topics page had a segment with ‘key figures’. This is obviously bad if you want to combat ‘hero worship’. My memory might be off but I seem to remember that the only social studies that were present were philosophy and economics, and practically everyone on that page was a man. [EDIT: Found an image, my memory was pretty close and in fact that page still exists! AND SBF WAS STILL ON IT!]
Even now we have a tag for philosophy and economics, but not for sociology, anthropology, political science, gender studies or many other social studies.
These are also the two social studies that the rationalists are the most interested in. The accusation of ‘bad epistemics’ seems to coincide a lot with ‘non-rationalist epistemic’. I’ve wanted to push back on the dominant rationalists framework for quite a while now, and one post in particular I wanted to write is an attack on scientific-realism and a defense of social constructivism. I never did it because I feared it would get downvoted, nominally because it’s not directly ‘effective altruism’. But the hidden premises in how we research, how we categorize the world and what gets to count as ‘genuine science’ have a huge effect on what gets to count as ‘effective altruism’.

Bob Jacobs Jan 17, 2023, 11:14 AM
0 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ben_West🔸’s comment on: Ben_West’s Shortform
How about: getting a lot of downvotes from new accounts doesn’t decrease your voting-power and doesn’t mean your comments won’t show up on the frontpage?
Half a dozen of my latest comments have responded to HBDers. Since they get a notification it doesn’t surprise me that those comments get immediate downvotes which hides them from the frontpage and subsequently means that they can easily decrease my voting-power on this forum (it went from 5 karma for a strong upvote to now 4 karma for a strong upvote).
Giving brigaders the power to hide things from the frontpage and decide which people have more voting-power on this forum seems undesirable.

Bob Jacobs Jan 16, 2023, 2:38 PM
−1 points
5 ∶ 3
in reply to: Anon Rationalist’s comment on: CEA statement on Nick Bostrom’s email
Why did you reply to MissionCriticalBit when it was I who made that claim? I almost didn’t see it.
Also pointing out that the academics who study this stuff for a living don’t believe in it is not fallacious, but rather a very useful piece of information.
Anyway, I wanted to give the HBDers another shot so I downloaded the survey (can we all agree that paywalls for publicly funded research is bullshit?) and I have two important things to note: genetic gaps is not equivalent to racial gaps, and the survey itself admits it is unrepresentative.
It was an internet survey:
The EQCA was an online survey administered from May 2013 to March 2014.
and had a high nonresponse rate:
a total of 265 responses were received, which produced a response rate of 19.71%.
with respondents who are different than the field as a whole:
In the current study, the EQCA sample leaned slightly to the left (54%, Table 2). The left tilt of the EQCA sample was small compared to the left tilt observed for psychologists overall, who overwhelmingly identify as left-liberal (90% or higher, Duarte et al., 2015). [...] In addition, the EQCA sample was predominantly male (83%), far exceeding the male share of APA membership, which is mostly female (57%, APA Center for Workforce Studies, 2015).
which heavily biases the results in favor of your position:
In contrast, compared to female and left (liberal) experts, male and right (conservative) experts were more likely to endorse the validity of IQ testing (correlations with gender, politics: r = .55, .41), the g factor theory of intelligence (r = .18, .34), and the impact of genes on US Black-White differences (r = .50, .48).
EDIT: To respond to missioncriticalbit below. My comment was about the sentence “HBD is not generally accepted in academia”. The reason I can’t show you a survey that shows you that is the same reason I can’t show you a survey that zoologists don’t believe in unicorns, they don’t engage with it so there is no survey available (even the bad survey by anon rationalist is not about HBD). But I don’t want to make an assertion without citing anything, so what is the best available option? How about an example of a professional biologists with no conflict of interests using publicly available data to create a well received paper that has been seen more than 12000 times that clearly rejects HBD.
Missioncriticalbit just makes assertions without citing anything. The reason I don’t respond and refused to continue to read his reply is not because I am afraid, but because he hadn’t cited anything, didn’t engage with my writings and outright insulted me.
The reason I respond in an edit instead of a reply is because the HBDers have removed half a dozen of my latest comments from the frontpage while taking away a big chunk of my voting-power on this forum. I’m not inclined to give them another way to take away my voting-power, but I don’t want to silence myself, so using the edit button is my workaround.

Bob Jacobs Jan 16, 2023, 1:44 AM
−2 points
5 ∶ 5
in reply to: MissionCriticalBit’s comment on: CEA statement on Nick Bostrom’s email
This list is a good example of the sort of arguments that look persuasive to those already opposed to HBD, but can push people on the fence towards accepting it, so it may be net-negative from your perspective. This is what has happened to me, and I’ll elaborate on why – so that you may rethink your approach, if nothing else.
Even if you think my reasons failed, why would that push you towards accepting it? HBD is a hypothesis for how the world works, so the burden of proof is on HBD and giving a bad reason not to believe in HBD is not evidence for HBD. To give a very clear example, if someone says ‘I believe in unicorns’, and I say ‘no unicorns do not exist because 1+1=3’ that would fail to be evidence for unicorns not existing, but that does not mean it counts towards evidence for unicorns existing.
Disclaimer: I am a non-Western person with few traits worth mentioning. I identify with the rationalist tradition as established on LW, feel sympathy for the ideal of effective altruism, respect Bostrom despite some disagreements, have donated to GiveWell charities on EA advice, but I have not participated more directly. Seeing the drama, people expressing disappointment and threatening to leave the community, and the volume of meta-discussion, I feel like clarifying a few details that may be hard to notice from within your current culture, and hopefully helping you mend the fracture that is currently getting filled with the race-iq stuff.
Thank you for donating to GiveWell! Unimportant nitpick that has always bothered me: LW has an empiricist tradition, the term ‘rationalist’ is a misnomer.
All else being equal, people who hang around such communities prefer consistent models (indeed, utilitarianism itself is a radical solution to inconsistencies in other ethical theories). This discourse is suffused with intellectual inconsistency, on many levels of varying contentiousness.
I wouldn’t say other ethical theories are internally inconsistent. They might have other attributes or conclusions that you think are bad, but the major ethical theories don’t have any inconsistencies as far as I can tell. Do you have an example?On the other hand I do think Eliezer has some inconsistencies in his philosophy, although it’s hard to tell because he’s quite vague, doesn’t always use philosophical terminology (in fact he is very dismissive of the field as a whole) and has a tendency to reinvent the wheel instead (e.g his ‘Requiredism’ is what philosophers would call compatibilism). Now usually I wouldn’t mind it that much, but since philosophy requires such precision of language if you don’t want to talk past each other, I do think this doesn’t work in his favor.
- On the faint level of moral intuitions, there’s the strange beeline from the poorly supported prior that normalization of beliefs like Bostrom’s will lead to bad effects like discrimination, to the consequentialist decision against entertaining them.
I would like to point out that my comment was not about Bostrom.
- It is not clear that Bostrom’s beliefs are harmful in this way, or more likely to encourage a net increase in discrimination than their negation. Arguments from historical precedent have big problems with them: they do not address the direction of causality
I mean even if you don’t know which way the arrow of causality points, that’s still an unnecessarily big risk. It’s not particularly altruistic to make statements that have that big a chance of helping racists. You could also spend your time… not doing that. Also even if you reject arguments from historical precedent there is still the entire field of linguistic racism.
- As it is not considered normal in the modern culture to equate moral worth and ability for individuals of any group, it can be expected that the same will hold should the difference in ability between groups be acknowledged.
Just because people won’t publicly state it doesn’t mean it doesn’t influence their thinking. Take for example the stereotype of the welfare queen. While not everyone will explicitly state ‘this person has a lower moral worth’ (although some will) the racist stereotyping does lead to black people being harmed both socially and economically. The myth of meritocracy is strong, and people who are seen as unable to ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’ are looked down upon.
- Arguments from personal distress of users are valid points with regard to community health, but obviously (I hope) incommensurate with the question of global utility, and do not directly weigh on it.
What global utility? Racists want us to talk about this stuff, there are other correlations that are both on firmer ground, have more global utility and aren’t fulfilling the desires of racists.
- Perhaps the most obvious level is that specific failings Bostrom is credibly accused of (racist attitude, belief in the racial IQ difference, belief in the validity of IQ measurement) do not depend on HBD. (He has done himself no favors by bringing up eugenics). So it’s bizarre to see many people denounce his beliefs in toto, but support this denunciation with environmentalist explanations of the IQ gap
If you had read my comments you would’ve seen that I both didn’t respond to Bostrom, did respond to HBD and did support the environmental explantation of the IQ gap.
- – in effect, conceding the specific factual claim in Bostrom’s old email, or at least demonstrating that it is not beyond the pale by their own standard. To be clear: it is not in doubt that the IQ gap between Black and White Americans exists; and that it is as predictive of outcomes associated with cognitive capacity as IQ measurement is (which is to say, highly predictive – and this, too, is mainstream consensus). People who act indignant about such statements send a huge red flag, demonstrating either general unwillingness to educate themselves or irrational ideological bias on this specific matter. People who bring up irrelevant anti-HBD talking points demonstrate confused reasoning.
My comment didn’t deny the existence of an IQ gap and my comment was responding to sapphire who was talking about HBD specifically and so it wasn’t “irrelevant anti-HBD talking point”. If you’re not engaging with what I actually write I’m starting to think that spending hours on this comment wasn’t the best use of my time.
- what your list most reminds me of is polemics of sophisticated Creationists in the heyday of New Atheism. It’s a mix of true but irrelevant, misleadingly phrased, blatantly misinterpreting and patently false claims. Instrumentally they are gotchas
Very civil. It will not surprise you to learn that this does not motivate me to keep reading.
- So I won’t compete in citations
Yeah I’m out.
*I’m going to spend my time on something else now.

Bob Jacobs Jan 16, 2023, 12:45 AM
1 point
4 ∶ 2
in reply to: Kaspar Brandner’s comment on: CEA statement on Nick Bostrom’s email
The topic is extremely taboo
And with good reason, out of the billions of possible correlations to talk about this is one of the very few that will help racists.
Writing on such topics does the opposite of favoring your academic career
True, but most people can’t cut it in academia and if one fancies themselves a researcher this path will allow you to continue to keep doing that without a lot of intellectual competition. Plus you can still get funding from shady organizations like the Pioneer Fund (I call them shady because they funded the distribution of ‘Erbkrank’-a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics- as one of their first projects and because they have ties to white supremacists groups, so their impartiality is suspect)

Bob Jacobs Jan 14, 2023, 11:05 PM
5 points
2 ∶ 3
in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: CEA statement on Nick Bostrom’s email
but I also think it’s a bit unfair to point this out in the context of Kaspar Brandner sharing a lot of links after you did the same thing first
Yeah that’s fair. I mean I did give summaries, but it’s still fair. If I could go back in time I would’ve posted that comment first and I would’ve tried to explain my emotions/reasoning process to the HBDers on this forum more.
I would have said: I get the allure of taboo studies. I want to be a moral philosopher, but moral philosophers are very smart and they don’t get a lot of funding. So even if I work very very hard, I probably won’t get to be one. I need a way to stand out, to make people notice I would be a good researcher… oh what’s this? Everyone is avoiding these taboo studies. So researching them makes me both stand out and makes me a comparatively high quality researcher since almost no one is competing with me.
It’s competition/capitalism/moloch that is driving me towards these subjects and even knowing this doesn’t make the allure go away. But ultimately I care about people more, and there are often good reasons these taboo’s were put in place.
Perhaps the readers of this comment feel the same way. I empathize. The smart thing to have done was unpack these mental prioritizations immediately instead of grabbing my research. But I didn’t think of it, probably because I wanted to show that I could be a good researcher. Moloch got me. Please don’t spend your limited time on this subject, please don’t let moloch get you too.

Bob Jacobs Jan 14, 2023, 8:35 PM
6 points
9 ∶ 4
in reply to: Kaspar Brandner’s comment on: CEA statement on Nick Bostrom’s email
Given my priors and respect for my leisure time I’m not going to read those giant threads. I won’t downvote you since I haven’t actually read it, but let me ask you a related question:
Do you think that out of the billions of possible correlations in the social sciences, the best use of our finite time on earth is to study this one?
The incredibly flawed measure of ‘low iq’ is correlated with the arbitrary socially-contingent western category of ‘black people’ (almost certainly because of environmental factors). But there are millions of things correlated with the western category of ‘black people’ and there are millions of things correlated with ‘iq’.
Furthermore, there are so many more variables to study that are less flawed and less arbitrary, why should we focus on the one correlation out of billions that racist people –who want to make the world worse for out fellow human beings– want to us to talk about?

Bob Jacobs Jan 14, 2023, 10:28 AM
0 points
2 ∶ 3
in reply to: MikhailSamin’s comment on: CEA statement on Nick Bostrom’s email
Oops! Sorry, I only discovered the second link
It’s fine.
Studies don’t just use identical twins but twins in general. You are equating my two claims and attacking claims that I haven’t even made, I never talked about “whether or not some disease has a genetic component to it, when a twin study shows that there is?”. I made a claim that twins, even identical twins, don’t share exactly the same DNA and provided a link to an article that gave more information, and I made a second claim that twin studies were flawed and provided that claim with a link to an article with more information about that. All this stuff about that it can’t help us find diseases or that twin studies “shouldn’t be used” are claims I never made.
EDIT:
I’m not a biologist and will probably defer to any biologist entering this thread
For the record my study has some biostatistics, but it isn’t my strongest field and I’m mostly leaning on stuff my professors have explained:
I will also probably defer to a biologist/biostatistician.

Bob Jacobs Jan 14, 2023, 9:00 AM
0 points
3 ∶ 5
in reply to: MikhailSamin’s comment on: CEA statement on Nick Bostrom’s email
These are two separate links for two separate claims. ‘Twin studies are flawed in methodology.’ and ‘Twins, even identical twins, simply do not have exactly the same DNA.’, both of which are true. The confidence in the proposed HBD conclusions is simply not warranted by the evidence.
Many twin studies have the assumption that they share 100% of their DNA (which is false) and that they share the exact same environment (which is also false). This leads to underestimating environmental factors and underestimating non-genetic biological factors.
Furthermore, separated twin pairs, identical or fraternal, are generally separated by adoption. This makes them unrepresentative of twins as a whole and there can be some issues of undetected behaviors in the case of behaviors that many people keep secret presently or in their earlier lives.

Bob Jacobs

The Netherlands passed a law that would ban factory farming.